Video hands-on with the Huawei Ascend D quad

We're live at Huawei's Ascend D series announcement, where the manufacturer's just taken the lid off its first quad-core smartphone, the Ascend D quad. The device sees Huawei challenging top-tier Android manufacturers with a device offering super high-end specs in just about every area. Read on to find out what we thought of the phone, along with the first video of it in action.

Central to the D quad's power is its quad-core CPU, a custom part created by Huawei and its partners -- this promises high performance power when needed, and energy efficiency when idle. Physically, the device is your typical black slab -- unassuming enough to be easily mistaken for the Galaxy Nexus, but good looking, and it feels good in the hand thanks to the soft touch back. The Ascend D quad is pretty thin, but not excessively so -- Huawei's already got that based covered with the Ascend P1 S. Interestingly, though, it's offering a version with an extended battery as standard alongside the regular D quad -- the D quad XL, promising multiple days of use on a single charge.

In terms of software, Huawei has kept things pretty close to vanilla Android. There are a few changes to be sure, but the manufacturer hasn't messed with Google's well-crafted user experience. In our brief time with the device, what we saw was a very fast smartphone that also works well as a gaming device. We got a brief look at Riptide, and the combination of the 330ppi 720p display and that quad-core CPU resulted in a beautiful, fast gaming experience.

We'll have more on the Ascend D quad in the days ahead, as part of our continuing coverage of MWC.